Interruptions and Failure in Higher Education: Evidence from ISEG-UTL

“Interruptions and Failure in Higher Education: evidence from ISEG-UTL” 

Margarida Chagas Lopes1,2 () and Graça Leão Fernandes1,3

1. ISEG (School of Economics and Management, Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal); 2. SOCIUS (Research Centre in Economic and Organizational Sociology); 3.CEMAPRE (Centre for Applied Mathematics and Economics)

Paper accepted to be presented at ECER 2009 Vienna

Main Conference, 28-30 September 2009

(ID 522, Network 22 - Research in Higher Education)

Table of Contents

Introduction

A brief survey of the literature

Theoretical approach

Data and methodology

Some results

Qualitative data

Conclusions and policy implications

J.E.L. – I23

Key words: Portuguese Higher Education; Interruption; Failure; Adult Students; Bologna Chart; Policy Implications

Abstract

Proposal Information of Contribution 522
22. Research in Higher Education
Format of Presentation:Paper
Alternative EERA Network:9. Student Assessment
Keywords: Higher Education, Interruptions, Academic Success, Occupational Experience
“Interruption and Failure in Higher Education: evidence from ISEG”
Margarida Lopes1,2, Graça Fernandes1,3
1ISEG TechnicalUniversity of Lisbon (UTL), Portugal; 2Socius - ResearchCenter in Economic and Organizational Sociology/ISEG-UTL; 3Cemapre - The Center for Applied Mathematics and Economics
Presenting Author:Lopes, Margarida
Failure in Higher Education (HE) is the outcome of multiple time-dependent determinants. Interruptions in student’s individual school trajectories are one of them and that’s why research on this topic has been attracting much attention these days.
From an individual point of view, it is expected that interruptions in school trajectory, whatever the reason, influence success in undergraduate programs either this success is measured by time required to obtain a degree, the scores obtained in some more “critical” subjects in these programs or the number of enrolment registrations. Nevertheless, performing a paid job during interruption may in given circumstances positively affect academic success on account of the combination between learning and occupational experience
The study of interruptions’ impact on failure in HE is also important to help Education institutions at all grades to think about changes in organisational procedures, class timetables, syllabuses contents or teachers recruitment and training in order to fight this problem.
From a social and political point of view, interruptions are also a matter of concern since failure in HE affects individual’s lifelong learning opportunities, distort public funding allocation efficiency to HE institutions and create lag effects in the desired/planned outcomes of HE production functions. So, research on the impact of interruptions on failure in HE is important to support policy measures definition related to the articulation between Upper Secondary and HE programs.
In previous research we have shed some light into the determinants of failure in 1st year of HE studies using longitudinal data on ISEG’s undergraduate students. A further insight into this database revealed the existence of a meaningful number of students with interruptions in their school trajectories either in the transition from Upper Secondary to HE or within HE programs.
In this paper our major concern is to find some evidence on interruptions effects on HE failure among ISEG students using a life cycle approach with control group. We are interested in knowing wether the above mentioned effects are gender and/or specific graduation program neutral. We also want to search if work experience may counter balance the effect of interruption on academic success. We hope to be able to derive some useful recommendations to address policy making in the fields of pedagogic methodologies in HE, articulation between academic and occupational learning in the framework of Bologna Chart and public funding/fellowship policies in HE.

“Interruptions and Failure in Higher Education: evidence from ISEG-UTL” 

Margarida Chagas Lopes1,2 () and Graça Leão Fernandes1,3

1.Introduction:

Survival rates in Portuguese Higher Education (HE) remain low when compared to the European and OECD average. This means that the production function of HE in Portugal is still suffering from important deadweight losses which we must analyse in order to identify the main obstacles to success. Besides retention rates which has been the focus of previous studies, abandon and interruption seem to affect Portuguese HE trajectories severely.

This has become even more crucial now that the Bologna Process implementation has brought about huge changes in the degree programmes. These changes tend to adapt the previous curricula contents (first degree programmes that took 4 or 5 years) to a much shorter duration (3 years) with only minor cuts. Obviously, this significantly affects the retention, abandon and interruption rates.

In this paper we focused on interruptions. We have evidence that most students who interrupt have to reconcile studying with paid work and that a great majority of them repeatedlyrenew their enrolmentin the same HE institution. When asked about the reasons for this behaviour they often state that graduation is their life goal. They also reveal great awareness of the main reasons behind the interruption episodes. Among these reasons are some important features related with the HE institution’s organisation procedures, such as time scheduling and class groups. These issues should be considered by management, particularly now when HE institutions are opening to lifelong learning.

Financial and budgetary policies in HE also should take interruptions into consideration. As a matter of fact, financial policy affecting public universities relies on different success/failure and quality indicators. By distinguishing retention from interruption processes we are able to clarify the internal or exogenous nature of the obstacles affecting success.

From the students’ point of view interruptions are equivalent to longer time spells needed to complete the degree programme. However, most students have a job while interrupting studies and so experience and skills acquired throughout professional performance reinforce academic knowledge, especially when the latter does not encompass professional internships. The positive effect of this outcome may overcome the negative effects of the longer time spells needed to complete degree programmes.

The interruption spells and the amount of time required to graduate are not neutral for the individuals’ or the HE institution. The former should internalize this kind of eventual losses when addressing the cost-benefit analyses associated with prolonging studies as they exert multiple direct and opportunity costs: weaker ties to family and occupation trajectories, raising difficulties in forecasting labour market opportunities following graduation, a supplementary income effort… The government should also revise social policies addressed to HE students not only in terms of fellowship and loan policies (Cerdeira 2009) but also reassessing the articulation between Secondary education and HE degrees as well as providing more efficient information and consultancy advice regarding labour market insertion for graduates. In any case, not only private but also the social rate of return to education will be affected by interruption.

Administrative and pedagogic HE institutions’ organisation and models have to be reassessed and redesigned in order to allow for studying and occupational performance to be reconciled. Also, gross failure rates have to be broken down in order to isolate retention rates due to interruption (and abandon) for budgetary purposes as they affect funding eligibilitydifferently.

A brief survey of the literature

A full range of studies on interruptions in HE is now becoming available, but not in Portugal to our knowledge. The studies differ mainly in terms of the analytical methodology – some of them analyse just a given cohort, others try to develop comparative statistics and compare several cohorts inside the same institution. These analyses also differ on the set of explanatory variables they associate with interruptions. With regard to last criterion we can distinguish three kinds of approaches:

-one which sets as leading factors both individual difficulties (e.g. being displaced) and families’ social and economic status, generally associated with income restrictions

-a second, which integrates mainly adult economically autonomous students who have to combine work and study and whosemain reasons for interruption derive from the difficulties in reconcilingthese two activities.

-a third, which is mainly concerned with the HE institution’s organisation procedures, syllabus contents, evaluation and pedagogical models, among others.

Let us briefly consider some research which illustrates each of the above approaches.

The research group at Moscow Lomonosov University coordinated by I.G. Teleshova (no date) stresses the importance of taking the probability of interruption in the evaluation of the effective equality of opportunities not only to access HE but especially to graduate successfully. The social and economic origin of the students’ family, the place of residence and the eventual need to be displaced for studying, education costs and programme length are presented as the leading factors behind interruption. Gender too is discussed as an important factor as well as administrative and pedagogic variables. However, the research only focuses on one cohort allegedly because the variables would not change meaningfully over time.

Relying upon data from the American National Longitudinal Survey the study by Scott and Bernhardt (2000) stresses the fact that for most students with few economic resources interruption to perform a paid occupation and returning later to school is the only way to continue studying. Advice on financial help, flexible attendance procedures and innovation in administration’s programme are the key stones for these authors.

Self-orientation, commitment and work-life conciliation are the leading factors stressed by Makinen et al (2004) in their analysis of interruptions by 1st year students from a Finnish university. They subdivide students into three categories: the study oriented, the work-life oriented and the non-committed. They show that while the non-committed are the most prone to abandoning studies, the work-life oriented obtain higher study credits and display a higher probability of graduating. Therefore, reconciling studying and a professional occupation could be advantageous in certain situations.

Another very interesting study, despite applying to just one cohort of students, is developed by Parri & Aas (2006). They try to ascertain the influence of the national examination score obtained by students at the end of Secondary Education on both the length of studies and the probability of interruption in HE. They found that students with lower scores faced higher probabilities of interruption. But when controlling for the kind of funding and the public/private nature of the HE institution the former effect vanished and only the latter remained meaningful. Having observed that completion rates were higher and probabilities of interruption lower among Estonian larger public institutions they looked at organisational and pedagogical features and concluded that quality of teaching and resources offered for teaching and learning, regulation of studies (e.g. the nuclear structure) and evaluation policy are the main determinants of interruption.

Jacob and Weiss (2008) focus upon another leading issue: the main reasons behind returning to school after having interrupted HE studies. Besides individual characteristics such as age when entering HE, a set of quite pertinent factors appeared as the outcome of the analysis, namely: the public/private nature of the educational institution, the degree of programme standardization, the degree of flexibility within the labour market, the tenure associated with professional experience and the parallel/sequential nature of the study and working trajectories.

From this brief review we retain the following as main variables:

- students’ gender and age;

-the SES of the family of origin;

-score obtained in the university entry examination;

-the need to perform paid work, prior to and during the interruption;

-objective and subjective opportunities and administrative facilities to reconcile study and work (class shifts…), evaluation regimen, perceived quality of teaching…;

-time interdependence between insertion and performance within the labour market and HE application and attendance trajectories.

Theoretical Approach

These kinds of analyses pertain to the critical assessment of human capital theories (HCT) and the proposal of more realistic alternatives such as life cycle theories[1].

Actually, neither education nor training trajectories necessarily follow a continuous and linear pattern. Nor do they finish just before the individual’s insertion into the labour market. If we continued supporting this hypothesis there would not be room for the theoretical consideration of lifelong learning and what is commonly called new learning opportunities. Of course HCT don’t reject learning opportunities once in the labour market; as a matter of fact, most reference authors have been quite concerned with the effect of occupational experience and vocational/professional training on workers’ skills. But these approaches usually discard the role formal education can play after insertion into the labour market, or during inactivity, unemployment or employment spells.

HCT generally neglect the diversity of roles that individuals actually play as an outcome of the multiple trajectories which encompass life cycles: education and training trajectories, vocational and occupational ones, transitions relative to a family’s situation, and others. In fact there is indeed no reason for those trajectories not to juxtapose.

We are now perfectly aware of the time dependency effects which characterize those trajectories’ interaction: individual labour market outcomes are usually dependent on the previous school trajectory; further studying decisions and opportunities strongly depend upon previously made school track choices, scores obtained, field of studying. Education and training trajectories are also deeply intertwined with the family’s social and economic status and family transitions; both of them are quite contingent upon and deeply condition “new” learning opportunities. In the next flowchart we try to plot the interplay among some of the above trajectories during an individual life cycle:

Source: adapted from Chagas Lopes (2007)

The question which concerns us the most in this paper has to do with the education and training trajectories. As can be seen from the above representation, two interruption spells are represented in this example, one at the time of labour market insertion, the second in the middle of active life. We allow formal education/training after labour market entry and (eventually) “new learning opportunities” as depicted by the second and third education blocks, respectively.

In view of this paper’s main purpose, and referring to the flowchart above, we consider that HE can be represented by each of the three education blocks: it can take place at different moments in the individual life cycle (each one of the three education blocks). Of course, attending and trying to complete HE before entering the labour market (and possibly before any family transition as well), the first block, would ceteris paribus become easier for a given family’s social and economic status and previous school performance. Nevertheless, occupational experience may in some situations contribute to improving academic performance as we have already referred[2].

Variables like the above must therefore be taken into account when we study success and failure in HE. They must also be considered when we take a specific element among (in)success processes, e.g. interruptions, as in the present case.

Data and Methodology

In this study we use data gathered by the ISEG Pedagogic Observatory. ISEG is the School of Economics and Business Management of the Technical University of Lisbon, the second larger School of that public University.

Our data set merged data on all students (82) who experienced interruptions in their HE trajectory from the moment they entered HE until 2007 and a random sample of 106 students who entered HE at ISEG on the same period but graduated 4 years after entering HE. We took six cohorts with HE entrance from 1997 to 2002 in order to control for changing graduation programs and selectivity level at the HE entry exam.

The random sample was chosen so that the weight of year t (t=1997, …, 2002.) students in the sample is approximately equal to the same weight in the data set on students who experienced interruptions, since we intend to use successful students as a control group in the study of the performance of those whose HE trajectory is characterized by interruption episodes.

We had information on individual characteristics (sex, age at the moment they entered HE, civil status, participation in labour market, HE entry-exam score), parents’ socio-economic background (mother’s and father’seducational level, situation regarding occupation and employment), proxies of success/failure in HE (number of failures before success in some core 1st year subjectsof HE [Maths I, Economics I and Introduction to Management].

Thus, our data set had 188 observations, and a variable IDENT which takes value 1 if the observation belongs to the graduate data set and 2 for students who experienced interruptions.We began bycharacterizing both groups with regard to individual characteristics, parents’ socio-economic background and performance in HE.

Further, in a first step towards a deeper insight into the characterization of the students with interruptions in their HE trajectory, using graduate students as a control group, we performed Chi-Square tests to see if the distribution in the two groups of the discrete variables is dependent on the group to which the observations belong.

For the continuous numeric variables, age at HE entrance and average score, number of failures before success in Maths I, Economics I and Introduction to Management, we carried t-student Compare Means for Independent Samples Test.

Some results

The students whose HE trajectories are characterized by one or more interruptions are mostly males (58.5%), aged between 19 and 20 years old at entry to HE (46.3%), and unmarried (96.3%). Most of them participated in the labour market (62.9%) either with a full time job (46.3%) or a part time job (19.5%). They are\were mainly in the Management Degree Program (57.7%). Most of them interrupt their HE trajectory in their third curricular year although some did it in their first [Figure 1].